Krzysztof Koźmic's blog

Since I got my Kin­dle DX over 6 months ago I’ve been buy­ing lots of Ebooks. Some from the kin­dle store, but actu­ally most of them directly from pub­lish­ers. mostly O’Reilly, and Prag­matic Book­shelf but also few oth­ers. Both pub­lish­ers offer ebooks in vari­ety of for­mats, includ­ing .mobi which works on Kin­dle (includ­ing Kin­dle apps for Windows/iOS and Android), epub which works on IPad and many other devices. The books are nicely for­mat­ted, includ­ing great for­mat­ting of source code, links are click­able etc.

Above you can see an exam­ple of that, from a Prag Prog book, screen­shot comes from the awe­some Kin­dle for Android app.

I do this intro­duc­tion to show you that I am used to a high stan­dard of books. Also the fact that most pub­lish­ers offer books in sev­eral for­mats (.mobi and .epub as a bare min­i­mum, but most of them also offer PDFs that work on mobile devices and O’Reilly even offers .apk for some books). That’s the qual­ity I’m used to and that I expect. And then I bought a book from another pub­lisher – Packt Publishing.

Please be advised that the fol­low­ing is a rant.

tl;dr ver­sion – Packt Pub­lish­ing absolutely sucks. Don’t buy from them.

Fail one – “yes, we have .epub” (no you don’t)

The above comes from their web­site. I really wanted to get .mobi to read it com­fort­ably on my Kin­dle, but I fig­ured the epub will do. I can read epub on my phone and I thought I’ll just con­vert it to mobi if I needed. To my sur­prise and unlike adver­tised the .epub ver­sion of the book was nowhere to be found. I obvi­ously learned that after I payed. To be fair, I checked few weeks ago and there was the epub ver­sion. It’s still a fail as they didn’t let me know in any way that it became available.

Fail two – “here’s your epub” (are you kid­ding me?)

I thought that (finally) get­ting the epub ver­sion would be the end of my prob­lems. I was wrong – turns out they screwed up the for­mat­ting of code sam­ples – there’s no inden­tion at all, which makes read­ing them a hor­ri­ble expe­ri­ence (and the book I bought has lots of code samples).

Screen­shot comes from fan­tas­tic Aldiko app for Android. To make sure that the for­mat­ting issue is not the fault of the app I checked it on two other apps includ­ing one on my PC – it’s bro­ken everywhere.

Fail three – “you can read the .pdf on Kin­dle” (no I can’t)

Back to the pur­chase day — oh well, I thought, at least I have the .pdf ver­sion of the book. I opened it on my PC and it looked all right. So I copied it to my kin­dle and to my phone to read it on the bus the fol­low­ing day. The fol­low­ing day though when I tried to open it, it would show me the cover but when I tried to move for­ward to where, you know – the con­tent is, the Kin­dle would freeze and show me white screen and .pdf viewer app on my Android would just plainly refuse to oper­ate and crash. So the only option I was left with was to read the pdf on my PC.

Fail four – “Our com­mit­ment is to reply to all e-mails within 48 busi­ness hours.” (Well, it’s been four months…)

That really pissed me off, so I found con­tact info and send them an email:

I’m still wait­ing for the response.

Fail five – “We won’t spam you any­more. Promise” (oh, btw, here’s our lat­est offer)

After giv­ing up on them I noticed that they started send­ing me spam with offers for new books they pub­lish. I com­plained and (to my sur­prise) quickly got an email with apolo­gies and promise they won’t spam me again. How­ever here’s what I found in my inbox today (the mail above, below is the other email from some time earlier):

Bot­tom line

I now really appre­ci­ate the effort other pub­lish­ers put into the high qual­ity ebooks they pro­duce I’m now even more happy to pay for them, know­ing how hor­ri­bly expe­ri­ence with ebook pub­lish­ers can be.